Economy Is People

A great demonstration of the fact that economy is people, from the 1920s:

On behalf of the pool, the pool manager, as broker, would begin buying and selling shares of the stock at frequent intervals, in no apparent pattern. Often he would buy and sell it back and forth among the members of the pool…..these essentially spurious transactions, accomplished with the sympathetic help of the specialist, would be so weighted that the price of the stock would begin to rise slightly. In speculators’ jargon, it would be “active and higher”…Thus the stock would be called to the public’s attention, and the notion of making a quick profit in it planted in the public’s mind. The eager tape-watchers would gradually begin to buy – cautiously and tentatively at first, then as the activity continued to increase and the price to rise, more and more boldly. Now the pool manager’s operations would become more delicate. On some days he would abruptly switch to the selling side, simply to create confusion; then just when the public was about to decide the picnic was over, he would come back in with a torrent of buying that would sweep all along with him. Finally, in a skillfully conducted manipulation, the thing would become self-sustaining; the public would in effect take the operation over, and in a frenzy of buying at higher and higher prices would push the stock on up and up with no help from the pool manager at all. That was the moment of the final phase….often spoken of indelicately as “pulling the plug.” With a mousiness in sharp contrast to the elaborate fanfare with which he had begun his buying, the pool manager would begin feeding stock back into the market. The price would respond by turning downward, gradually at first, then more rapidly as the pool manager’s trickle of sales mounted to a flood; and before the public could collect its senses, the retreat would have become a rout, the pool wold have unloaded its entire bundle profitably, and the public would be left holding the suddenly deflated stock….

Proof that fund managers are not in the business of manipulating dollars, they're in the business of manipulating people.

Another fantastic example of that (which actually extends the example above) is the profile Planet Money did on Proprietary Trading. The central contention there is that investment banks took money on behalf of people to invest in the market, and then used that money to help make their own investments do better, at the cost of the people who were investing their money through them.

Court Commentary: Berghuis v. Thompkins

The Court handed down a big ruling today in Berghuis v. Thompkins about the Miranda Rule. SCOTUSblog:

...the Court held, by a vote of five to four, that suspects must explicitly tell police that they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal investigations. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was longer than the majority opinion and drew particular notice. The L.A. Times’s David Savage describes it as her “first strongly written dissent,” while Tony Mauro of the National Law Journal characterizes it as perhaps “her most important writing since joining the Court.”

In the case, the defendant (Thompkins) was being questioned in a murder trial. For three hours he said not a single word -- he held absolute silence. In the third hour, he was asked whether he would like to pray to God for forgiveness for his crime, and he responded, "Yes."

Thompkins' lawyers argued that the "Yes" could not be used against Thompkins in the court of law because he had, in those three hours, been absolutely silent -- thus asserting his right under the Miranda Rule to remain silent.

The court ruled against that, saying that in order for you to assert your right to silence, you need to verbally and deliberately invoke your right to silence. Even if you are silent for three, five, twenty hours, if you speak you are waiving your right to silence.

Unfortunately, there are no protections to prevent law enforcement officials from simply waiting you out, barraging you with questions, and generally bullying until you break under the pressure. Granted, it's not forced confession like torture, but it still may lead to false confessions from those prone to break under pressure.

I agree with Sotomayor's passionate dissent. Note, by the way, that Sotomayor is the only trial judge on the Supreme Court. The other justices come from non-criminal Trial backgrounds, and so they perhaps have less direct experience with criminal trials, and the way that the protections afforded to the defendant protect them from abuses of the law.

In the world of the more esoteric, it may seem like a no-brainer that if a criminal says something they are waiving their right to remain silent (and it does seem in keeping with the way the Miranda Warning is phrased --- RTWT, btw, there's some fascinating distinctions between different nations and their equivalents to our Miranda Warning). But in practice, any right that you have to assert will be tailored to the educated and intelligent criminal; the poor and uneducated will not know.

According to NPR, criminal justice professors from right to left have been against the ruling; the people in favor of the ruling are law enforcement officials. One officer quoted in the NPR story said on air that the ruling is good because it would make things easier for police.

There's the bias: is easier for police always better for the community?

Ian Moss Bait

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez for NPR's local affiliate 89.3 reported:

Almost half the department’s full-time positions — 33 out of 70 — will be gone through layoffs, early retirement, or unfilled vacancies, Garay said. Fifteen people who work for Cultural Affairs will lose their jobs - some in two weeks, others in July.

(...)

The layoffs, Garay said, are part of budget cuts that include transferring the administration of city-owned theaters and art centers to other organizations. Under the plan, outside groups would assume control of the Madrid Theater in Canoga Park, the Vision Theater in Leimert Park, the Warner Theater in San Pedro, and the Watts Towers Art Center. The city will issue requests for proposals.

Last month, supporters of the cultural affairs department jammed an L.A. City Council meeting to oppose a proposal that would gut the department’s $10 million budget. Council members shelved the plan.

I don't know what the impact of the city getting rid of the arts buildings, but it was gratifying to see that there are a lot of "supporters of the cultural affairs department" (don't they just mean "supporters of the arts"?) in Los Angeles.

Diversity XXIII: The Checklist

I was reminded by the Guardian's blog post today about our last dust-up about diversity, which started with Scott's lottery proposal. (I won't link to all the significant conversation it started, but the Guardian blog post is a good overview)

At the time, I hashed out pretty clearly what my disagreement with it was, but I forgot to say the one philosophical point on which I agreed with it -- that it tried to find away to address implicit bias in the selection process. As I'm sure I don't need to say, even casting directors/hiring managers/etc. who think that they are open-minded demonstrate biases in their hiring practices. To cite just one example, a study in the American Economic Review found that blind auditions significantly increases the chance that women will be advanced or higher. The reason for this is because it takes away all of the extraneous biasing factors out of the hands of the auditioner and allows them simply to judge on the music. This is why many theaters that judge plays also judge blindly, and that's not exactly a new tactic.

But recently, I heard Atul Gawande's interview on NPR (and was reminded of it by The Daily Show's interview) about his book, the Checklist Manifesto.

The crux of the manifesto is this: every time a checklist is developed of things that you have to remember to avoid infection, and you force doctors to go through that checklist, rates of infection go down. The increase in positive medical outcomes is measurable, and at the end of the process, 80% of doctors say that the checklist improved outcomes and saved lives-- and 92% say that they want the doctor who's operating on them to use a checklist.

But the key revelation, I found, was the difference between those two numbers - the 12% of doctors who think the checklist is hogwash, but still want their doctors to use it. Partly that might be Pascal's Wager at work, but Dr. Gawande has some insight on why else that might be.

You see, even though he developed a checklist and insisted on its use, he didn't think he needed it himself. He thought the checklist was for other doctors. And yet, he too couldn't escape the data: his patients did better when he had a checklist. He didn't make as many mistakes.

The case in which checklists were used were to prevent carelessness. But I think the checklist idea might be able to address diversity... if you can figure out what belongs on the checklist.

So I call upon you, internet: say I'm the head of an organization who wants to ensure diversity in hiring practices. What would you have me put on my checklist?

Diversity VII: Death of Monoculture

This is going to be a short post because I'm starting to come down with a bad cold and my brain is getting fuzzy, but to tack on to my last post, where I talked about how diversity in theater is also going to be partly about diversity in audience.

I happened to re-look over Isaac's recent post about the death of monoculture in response to an NPR segment which I happened to hear as well, when it aired.

Isaac uses the death of monoculture meme to talk about our frustration that theater isn't changing fast enough, and briefly at the end gets to what the death of monoculture meme is really about:

We experience (To some extent) this sea change going on all over the place and wonder why the art form we love the most, that we are the most dedicated to, isn't changing at the pace of everything else. It's frustrating. And meanwhile, those who do not care about or are actively opposed, particularly those who define "good" as "coming out of the aesthetics of white male majoritarian culture" feel particularly threatened. With everything else changing, there's something comforting about institutional theater to those attached to that monoculture.

I think that's what 99Seats and Scott Walters mean when they talk about the "quality dodge." They're assuming that we're all rallying behind the artistic director in terms of perpetuating the monoculture (or, if you'd prefer, the "European patriarchal system" if you're in the 1960s). Some people are, but some of us aren't, in the same way that some opponents of the Single-Payer System are against health-care reform and other opponents of the Single-Payer System just don't think it's the most effective form of health-care reform.

If you reread Scott's post, it makes a lot more sense if you rephrase the argument as "Quality is irrelevant if you define quality as matching the whims of monoculture. Quality is relevant if you define quality as relevant to the local culture." That's a statement I could definitely get behind. I still would disagree with him that a lottery system would accomplish that shift, but it'd be nice to have common ground.

It doesn't surprise me, by the way, that after Isaac talked about monoculture, he reflected on why the Audience Matters.

So maybe what we need to do is figure out how our culture became mono-culture and take aim at that. The MFA-problem is one aspect of that, the New York centrism is another aspect of that, the inequity in access to arts education from an early age is (I think the most important) aspect of that.

And whereas Isaac is correct in his post that YouTube doesn't making doing theater any cheaper, one of his commenters (Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist!) points out:

People worry that the art of theatre and live performances are dying, but I disagree. In fact, I would argue that youtube (and Vimeo) have helped people to have a better appreciation for the arts and would introduce them to something new, something different. Now all you have to do is look up "Kabuki theatre" or "Bali puppet show" and you'll find a clip. This, in turn, will inspire people to read up on this and even get involved.

In a way, what technology leverages to us is an audience that has equal access to culture. Hopefully that'll be a more diverse audience, and then we'll start to turn the tide on this.

How To Start I: NPR

So, looking at this research (I'm still in the research/concept phase of the project, sneaking it in among the show I'm preparing for and my unrelated job as a technical writer), the first huge question that dawns on me is:

How do you start changing a community?

The problem, as I see it, is that the Thriving Arts report predicates the creation of an arts community on an already extant set of background values: a sense of place, a tradition of informal arts, a few people who already personally enjoy the arts, etc. The question, however, is where you start if such a thing is not available.

Obviously, there isn't such a thing in the universe as a place where there is no tradition of any arts or etc. The question is, where can you find a good thread to start with, a tiny spark that you can gently blow on and put kindling with to start a frame.

The one I was thinking of this morning is one that I've been thinking of for the last few days: National Public Radio.

I don't know exactly what NPR (and I suppose by extension PBS on TV) has in terms of reach in regional areas. But when I listen to Car Talk (the number one rated radio show), people call in from everywhere. Brooklyn. Tallahassee. Squunk Corners. The Hubble Spacecraft. The South Pole. So if we make the assumption that NPR is listened to everywhere -- at least some shows on it, at least a little bit -- then NPR's arts programming might be the beginning.

It would be really cool if NPR had an arts show that was quite as engaging as Car Talk is. After all, many of the people who listen and call in to Car Talk are not people previously interested in car. They're not the people who have a dead car on their lot that they're tinkering with. They're people like me--I've never even owned a car but I listen in. It's fun.

The other day on NPR, they were interviewing a publisher, and asked him whether fiction books published about the financial crisis are still going to be relevant three or four years from now, when the financial crisis is not what's in our minds. The publisher said, "It doesn't matter what it's about. If the characters are well written and they are put in engaging situations, people will read."

That's what we need to do with the arts, I think. We need to communicate a vision of the arts as being full of real characters and engaging situations. I don't mean on-stage. I mean us, as arts practitioners. We have to be real and engaging, and we have to be real and engaging when we discuss our work. We need a show where a couple of artists talk about art, and they don't use any sentences that begin with the word "Postmodern".

The Sloan Foundation understands this. They fund projects which promote science in fiction, but in engaging ways that bring the art into human contexts. And my favorite project that illustrates what the Sloan Foundation is talking about is WNYC's Radiolab. Each week, they ask a question ("Why do we laugh" or "What is music") and then spend the episode examining specific scientific aspects of that ("Do animals laugh" or "When does speech become song?") But the way that the hosts examine the questions, it isn't heavy on the science. It's high on the wonder.

A non-NPR example of this is, quite famously, Mythbusters. Another great example would be what Ace of Cakes does for the wedding-cake industry. By the way, Ace of Cakes is actually probably a good foundation for a community arts.

So how can we start an arts community? Well, you can start with a popular radio or television arts show (none of which exist, by the way--I'm a hardcore arts person, and I don't listen to a single arts podcast regularly, because... I haven't found any that are as engaging! Consider that a challenge, reader community: get me a podcast that I can subscribe do with my open-source music program that makes the arts fun and engaging). Then, you create a fan-club locally for the show. Start by watching/listening to the show together, move on to actually trying some of it hands on.

Hesto presto! It's a beginning.